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Europe
France
Monday 27 January 2025 People living in Western France have been hit by severe flooding, forcing residents to evacuate their homes by boat after a succession of storms, including Storm Herminia, following closely on the heels of Storm Éowyn, compounding the already saturated ground in Normandy and Brittany. The storms also impacted Spain and the UK. (Source: The Independent - United Kingdom)
Poland
2025-01-27 Poland's sports minister has said that the recent statements made by Musk, the founder of US car manufacturer Tesla, should face strong condemnation and even a boycott of his company by all Poles due to his recent call on Germans to leave behind their Nazi past. (Source: Polish Press Agency)
27/01/2025 Some of the few remaining survivors of Auschwitz returned to the notorious Nazi death camp today. The world marked the 80th anniversary of its liberation. How much recognition is there in Poland about what happened on Polish soil during WWII? Interview with Grabowski, co-founder of the Polish Centre for Holocaust. //Video/ (Source: YouTube - U.S. / France24)
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Belarus
January 27, 2025 The Central Election Commission declared early today that President Lukashenko won the election with nearly 87% of the vote after a campaign in which four token challengers all praised his rule. (Source: Fox News - U.S.)
Russia
January 27, 2025 Everyone wants US forces in Ukraine except the US. Russia’s now unstoppable advance across eastern Ukraine ushers in the inevitability that Ukraine has lost, and the war will end. The election of Trump ushers in the inevitability that the war will end with a negotiated settlement. Two things are now clear about that settlement: Ukraine will not be in NATO, and Russia will be in Ukraine. Ukraine will not be in NATO because Russia will continue the war if NATO membership is on the agenda in the negotiations. But Ukraine will also not be in NATO because Trump has made it clear that he will not support NATO membership for Ukraine. Zelensky’s second choice is a large European peace keeping force with the fully committed support of U.S. troops. That large peacekeeping force, Zelensky insists, cannot come only from Europe. ’Nobody will risk without the United States.’ ’French officials have made clear that the idea would need to involve some kind of U.S. backup.’ The problem is, Ukraine’s second choice is also unacceptable to the United States. Guaranteeing U.S. forces on the ground in Ukraine to confront Russia militarily is precisely the escalation that both Biden and Trump have been unwilling to make. NATO in Ukraine with Article 5 in its pocket and the U.S. on the ground in Ukraine with a guarantee in its hand to defend it are the same unacceptable risk by another name. There is also the fear that if Ukraine were ever to attempt to recapture Crimea or the Donbas, a Russian defense could draw the U.S. into the war. Russian President Putin expressed this sort of fear in the weeks before the war. So, what’s to be done? In order to enter into negotiations, Ukraine insists that the U.S. offer security guarantees that the U.S. is not willing to give. What security guarantees the U.S. is willing to give is a matter for the U.S. to decide, and it must take the security of American citizens seriously. Perhaps security arrangements will be a decision that the U.S. will have to make independent of Ukraine and will have to negotiate with Russia before inviting Ukraine to the talks. Perhaps any security arrangement that is acceptable to Ukraine is unacceptable to the U.S. and Russia. Perhaps, the security arrangement, the solution will, at last, have to be the broader European security structure that Russia sought, and the U.S. rejected, at the end of the Cold War. Russia expressed an openness to such a solution in the security proposal it offered the U.S. and NATO two months before the war. Putin made the suggestion again on May 15, 2024 when he said that Russia is “open to a dialogue on Ukraine, but such negotiations must take into account the interests of all countries involved in the conflict, including Russia’s. They must also involve a substantive discussion on global stability and security guarantees for Russia’s opponents and, naturally, for Russia itself.” (Source: Antiwar - U.S.)
by Snider, a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute, a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative.
United Kingdom
January 27, 2025 There is no small chance that Downing Street may be put into the awkward position of deciding whether to deploy British soldiers to Greenland on Denmark’s request, potentially to the ire of the Trump administration. The UK and Denmark are very close defence partners with co-operation in the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force and numerous additional bilateral ties. Among those is a commitment from a joint declaration in 2021 to deploy British troops to Danish territory in a “crisis“: “The UK and Denmark will cooperate on and train Host Nation Support to ensure fast deployment of UK forces through Danish territory in case of crises.” (Source: Guido Fawkes, a political website - United Kingdom)
Asia
China
Mon, Jan 27 2025 DeepSeek today said it would temporarily limit user registrations “due to large-scale malicious attacks” on its services. (Source: CNBC - U.S.)
Jan 27 2025 China’s new cheap AI DeepSeek outperforms West’s models like ChatGPT amid race to superintelligence. The Chinese owners released the app on Trump's inauguration day. DeepSeek surged to the top of Apple's App Store in the UK, US and China. (Source: The U.S. Sun)
Lebanon
January 27, 2025 22 civilians returning to their villages still under occupation in southern Lebanon were killed, 124 injured in Israeli attacks. Today marks the end of the 60-day deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw from border villages and towns in southern Lebanon, as outlined in the ceasefire agreement reached on November 27. (Source: Gulf Times - United Arab Emirates)
Syria
Jan 27, 2025 Israel launches fresh airstrikes on Syria. The military center of the 12th Brigade of the Syrian Army and the ammunition depots in that area were the targets of Israeli fighter jets. (Source: MEHR News Agency - Iran)
North America
United States
January 27, 2025 NATO was never about American security. During the 1947 pivot to Cold War Washington has badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to communists coming to power in France, Italy and elsewhere. Even the worst case – a communist France (or Italy or Belgium) – was not a serious military threat to America’s homeland security, not a mortal threat to liberty and security on America’s side of the Atlantic moat. And the post-war Soviet economy, its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht. A sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs - aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan and then NATO - were clinically described as “containment” measures, only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, not a prelude to intervention in eastern Europe or to an attack on Moscow itself. But they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta. But as it happened, abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991. The uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale and sustained effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left. NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond. Why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed? Why did Washington plunge instead into deeply entangling alliances in western Europe and unnecessary confrontation and overt conflict with Soviet Russia for no good reason of homeland military security? The prevalent Keynesian theorem at the time held that post-war demobilization would result in a collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression, the 1930s all over again. Most of Europe was fiscally incapacitated owing to the impacts of the war. The Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a substitute form of fiscal stabilization and safeguard against a relapse into 1930s-style depression. During the very first year of demobilization (1946), in fact, the US’ real private GDP grew by nearly 27% from 1945 and never looked back. What in 1945 had been a private sector GDP of $1.55 trillion in today’s dollars had jumped to nearly $2.0 trillion by 1947 and to more than $2.3 trillion by 1950. In 1950s, the private GDP growth rate clocked in at 7.6% per annum over the five-year period. So the American economy never came close to tumbling into the Keynesian abyss. There was no reason to believe that the European economies would not have similarly turned the corner to civilian prosperity in due course. Washington’s “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland security – the only valid basis for the foreign policy of peaceful Republic. Based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class and military contractors during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn. These European foundations, in turn, surely and inexorably formed the gateway to Empire and the fiscally crushing Warfare State that now plagues the nation. The Soviet leadership viewed themselves as relatively vulnerable and were well aware that their country was much weaker in industrial and military capability than the United States. Their prime concern was consolidating the territory and security gains in Eastern Europe. Stalin himself had still pursued a variant of detente with the Western Powers, hoping to reach a negotiated settlement on most areas of difference, especially on the question of Germany’s future. As Secretary Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech at Harvard, the details of the American plan unfolded, the Soviet leadership slowly came to view it as an attempt to use economic aid not only to consolidate a Western European bloc, but also to undermine recently-won Soviet gains in Eastern Europe, Stalin’s new chain of Soviet-oriented buffer states, for reintegration into the capitalist economic system of the West, an offensive attempt to subvert Soviet security interests. Stalin ordered Poland and Czechoslovakia to withdraw from planning meetings in late July that involved discussions with the west about joining the Marshall Plan - discussions he had initially blessed. All Soviet bloc participation in the Marshall Plan ceased and Stalin’s calculus shifted sharply towards a strategy of confrontational unilateral action to secure Soviet interests. The Soviet leadership was moved primarily by fear of its own vulnerability to American economic power, not by a plan of world conquest which became the ultimate justification for the post-war American Empire. The Marshall Plan had its offensive side as well, in that its authors did indeed hope to lure some of the Eastern European states out of the Soviet orbit and integrate them into the Western European economy. The plan was more than just a geostrategic move to counter Soviet expansionism. The real difficulty and source of conflict in 1947 was neither Soviet nor American aggression. The current status quo was unstable, and that assertive action was required to defend that status quo. The Western powers felt compelled to design the details of the Marshall Plan in such a way that it would stabilize Western Europe, but only at the cost of provoking a confrontation with the USSR. Neither the West nor the Soviet Union deliberately strove to provoke a confrontation with the other. The fluid political and economic conditions in postwar Europe compelled each side to design policies which were largely defensive, but had the unfortunate consequence of provoking conflict with the other. The entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Once both sides had the A-bomb the nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation. To be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally plausible and very highly certain. In the 1950s the US had this deterrence capacity early on – with long-range strategic bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union and returning with mid-air refueling. These strategic bombers included the B-50 Superfortress and the B-36 Peacemaker having a range of up to 10,000 miles without refueling. The introduction of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in 1955 - which could carry a heavy bomb load and had a range of approximately 8,800 miles without aerial refueling - removed any doubt. For several years to follow the Soviets relied upon the Tupolev Tu-4 to deliver their nukes, which was a reverse-engineered copy of the U.S. B-29 Superfortress, including limited range and payload capacity, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of A-bombs to the U.S. without risking detection and interception. The Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Age (ICBM) materialized in the second half of the 1950s. The Soviets were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka. The Soviet Union had only deployed 4 of these ICBMs by 196o. The United States conducted its own first ICBM tests at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in October 1959. By the end of 1960, the United States had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962. As the decade unfolded, neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. The core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories. The same logic was extended to submarine based missiles. In the mid-1960s, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from the home country of each. There was no risk of conventional military attacks on the US on the far side of the great ocean moats. So NATO was not any kind of useful military defense asset for the US. NATO had actually and materially added to the cost of US military security. The nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there for the purpose of defending European nations from a Soviet threat – but one which in any case should have been addressed by their own military capabilities from their own fiscal resources. Washington’s plunge into “entangling alliances” has had the effect of sharply lessening Europe’s Warfare State costs by effectively shifting them to American taxpayers. America didn’t get any extra homeland security in the bargain. What it did get was the privilege of indirectly footing the bill for Europe’s generous Welfare States and enslavement to the myth that global alliances, allies, bases, interventions and regime change adventures have kept the world stable and America safe. But none of that is true. (Source: Antiwar - U.S.)
by Stockman, who was a two-term Congressman from Michigan, also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan. After he had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed; The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America; TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back; and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm.
January 27, 2025 On Nov. 20, the US cast the only “No” vote in the U.N. Security Council against a call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. On December 31, Mearsheimer wrote on Substack about the 179-page report Human Rights Watch issued a few days earlier detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Mearsheimer wrote that he wonders what people “who have supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night. History will not treat them kindly.” (Source: Antiwar - U.S.)
by Duncan Jr. who served as the U.S. representative for Tennessee’s 2nd congressional district from 1988 to 2019; a lawyer, former judge, and former long serving member of the Army National Guard, member of the Republican Party.
January 27, 2025 U.S. stocks tumbled today, led by tech shares, as the growing buzz around Chinese startup DeepSeek's low-cost AI model sparked concerns about the sector's high valuations. (Source: Reuters - United Kingdom)
January 27, 2025 Colombians make up a sizable portion of the U.S Hispanic population. There were over 1,628,927 people who identified as Colombian in 2023, according to Census data. Sixty percent were born outside the United States, and 70% are either U.S.-born or naturalized citizens. Florida is home to 473,606 Colombians, according to the U.S. Census data. Florida accounted for a quarter of all U.S. trade with Colombia and it was Florida’s second-largest export market in 2019. South Florida was also a voting hub for Colombians voting abroad during the 2022 presidential elections. The country’s government set up several voting stations across the region, and more than 100,000 Colombians registered to vote here. (Source: Miami Herald - U.S.)
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